Rohit Satija, PhD

I am a co-founder, as well as the current President & CEO of ETHNIC AI, Inc. Our mission is to help create medical superintelligence for the benefit of all.

In my part-time, I contribute to HIV drug resistance research with collaborators at the Stanford School of Medicine, building database and software for clinicians and public health researchers around the world.

Previously, I was a Computational Biologist at Pivotal Life Sciences, an early-stage therapeutics-focused biotech Venture Capital firm. At Pivotal, I was part of the AI and Data Intelligence team, building an internal AI platform for due dilligence and NewCo creation.

Before Pivotal, I was a Multiscale Modeling Researcher at Genentech, where I developed a computational workflow for predicting protein-protein and protein-drug interaction kinetics using Alphafold, Molecular Dynamics simulations, Markov State Models, and analytical rate theories from statistical mechanics. I also collaborated with Discovery Chemistry and PK/PD teams to generate molecular-level insights into portfolio drug candidates.

I did my postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, in the lab of Carlos J Bustamante, where I worked on interrogating dynamics of artificially designed proteins using optical tweezers experiments. I also contributed to an explanation for anomalous power spectra of DNA Origami tethers in these experiments.

I earned my PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, in the group of Dmitrii E Makarov, where I contributed to the development of a theory for interpreting dynamics of low-dimensional coordinates observed in single-molecule experiments and simulations. Serendipitously, we found that there is a theoretical bound on the width of transition path time distributions for Markovian models, and this bound is violated by the observed long tails. This implied that the use of the one-dimensional diffusion model to interpret dynamics of protein folding in single molecule experiments is unjustified.

Outside ETHNIC AI and Stanford, I explore projects at the intersection of open source software development and medicine. Recent highlights include:

• MedResearch — A platform to democratize biomedical research and provide evidence-based answers to serious medical questions.
• Sarepta FDA 2025 RAG Agent — Chat with FDA documents, clinical studies, press reports, and SEC filings relevant to the Elevidys issue.
• Drug Target DILI Risk Score — A tool to predict the risk of drug-induced liver injury.

When I step away from work, you can usually find me on a tennis court, studying chess tactics, reading philosophy, or hiking in the Bay Area with my wife and dog.